


on the creation and storage of lightning

by Casylum



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:21:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25434580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: Petunia Evans marries Vernon Dursley two months after she meets him, in a quiet civil ceremony attended by his parents, her best friend, and a conspicuous absence in the shape of her sister.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	on the creation and storage of lightning

**Author's Note:**

> > “It is a long time,' repeated his wife; 'and when is it not a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.'  
> 'It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,' said Defarge.  
> 'How long,' demanded madame, composedly, 'does it take to make and store the lightning? Tell me?”
> 
> —Charles Dickens, _A Tale of Two Cities_
> 
> ~~~
> 
> Additionally, because we live in a garbage time, and the author of the source text this fic is referencing is, herself, an insult to garbage cans everywhere, please know that her views regarding the transgender community are exactly as petty, cruel, and small minded as the villains in the stories she wrote. If you have the ability, please consider supporting transgender communities and advocacy groups in your area, whatever they may be, with your time, money, or simple willingness to speak up in their defense and raise their voices up to be heard.

Petunia Evans marries Vernon Dursley two months after she meets him, in a quiet civil ceremony attended by his parents, her best friend, and a conspicuous absence in the shape of her sister.

Lily Evans-Potter and her husband had disappeared off the face of the map five months previous, to the point that even though Petunia was sure she'd known where they were moving to, the name never quite made it past the back of her mind. 

Which was—fine, completely fine. Lily had been disappearing—mentally, physically, magically—since they were children, and Mummy and Daddy started shouting under the scant cover of BBC Radio One. It was, in part, why Petunia had married Vernon at all: she knew Lily would disapprove, and she wanted her to pop out of whatever hole she'd fallen into to say so. 

Petunia may not understand her sister, may resent her for the magic that became her ticket out of mediocre schooling, grey suburbia, and a future as a housewife, but she does love her. Enough to know when enough's enough, and when to start worrying.

She spends the latter half of the seventies gripped with a certain kind of paranoia. Vernon thinks maybe it's the Irish, or the Reds, or the Labour Party that's causing her to twitch at sudden noises and flickers of movement, but all Petunia can think of are half-remembered conversations overheard in one of the few times Lily and James came to her pre-Vernon flat, muttering about war, genocide, prophecies, and danger.

And then, just as Dudley—who seems, even at a young age, to have absorbed the worst of his parents—is graduating to baby food, she finds a toddler on her doorstep, wrapped in a blanket that smells of sweat, smoke, motor oil, and wet dog. He's accompanied by an entirely unhelpful letter written in impractical green ink, and the news he carries with him makes Petunia slide down the wall in her front hall, clutch him to her chest, and sob.

Her sister—dead, murdered in some sort of fantastical hate crime; her brother-in-law—dead by the same means; her nephew—orphaned, targeted by a cult of racist you-know-whats, destined for something-or-other, and trapped in a house with Vernon Dursley, who'd never met a foreigner he hadn't mistrusted.

It was why Petunia had married him—she'd never met anyone else so stolidly, implacably, mundanely English—and it was why she couldn't think of a worse place for her sister's son. Little Whinging was painfully boring, Surrey notable for nothing, and Vernon Dursley swanned through all of it, content to sell drills and spoil their only child.

~~~

Vernon puts him in the downstairs cupboard, and Petunia says nothing. 

She'd thought about it—thought about using the spine she used to be so proud of, taking Dudley and Harry off, away from the home that will ruin them both in different ways, but she doesn't. She never went to school, never held a job other than summer clerking, and—now that Lily's gone—doesn't have family worth speaking of. Petunia is a housewife and very little else, as banal as the flower she's named for, but she's never felt quite so trapped in it.

The years go by. Dudley grows up selfish, spoiled, and afraid of his father's wrath; Harry grows up weedy, headstrong, and all too ready to incur the same. Her boys are mirror opposites, right down to the fact that Dudley is a consummate mamma's boy, and Harry barely considers them family at all.

Petunia wishes she could say that she did it deliberately, that she'd hatched the plan that first day, as she sat in the front hall, Harry cradled in her arms, but she can't. It had come to her in the months after, when the tension with Vernon about suddenly adopting her sister's orphaned son with zero explanation other than "he needs us" was reaching a fever pitch.

 _Who would want to stay here_ , she remembers thinking, _unless they absolutely had to_ , and that was when it clicked. 

The letter left with Harry had been vague and frustratingly portentous, going into the deeper workings of all that nonsense Lily had brought home as if Petunia had been the one to go to Pigfarts, or Hogwarts, or wherever, instead of her sister. There was a level of assumed knowledge Petunia knew she was missing, just as sure as she knew that she'd never have it, but one thing came through clearly: Harry was in danger, Harry was their last hope, Harry needed to be kept safe. 

She didn't—and still doesn't—give a toss about the future of a world that had taken Lily from her and abandoned Petunia in Cokeworth, but she very much cared about removing the person—the thing—that had killed her sister. It was that thought that guided her actions, that had her look aside when Vernon was being particularly horrible, and allow Harry to slowly turn from the bright, inquisitive child she'd scooped off the front step and brought into her home to a quiet, reserved boy with so much unspoken anger, all of it rightfully directed at her.

Then the letters came, and all of it came to a head, tumbling back down into the weirdness and oddity that had consumed Lily at the same age, stealing Harry away into a world that adored him, and that he adored just as much. 

Number 4 becomes even more of a prison to him, a stifling bit of regularity and normalcy that Harry becomes more and more adept at escaping, until one day, after his seventeenth birthday, he disappears, and Petunia knows.

As if the visit they'd had from Dumbledore wasn't enough, the signs are all there—the disappearances, the disasters, Diana—leaving Petunia with the same sense of foreboding she'd had before her wedding.

Ultimately, she thinks, watching Dudley do his best to pretend like he's revising for his A-Levels half a year after Harry left, it was never the fact that Lily was magic and she wasn't. It was the stark, terrifying reality that there was a power beyond her in every conceivable way, one that could affect her life and her family without her even knowing, one that had Lily give her parents vague warnings before she vanished, and finally took her beyond anyone's reach.

Petunia has always been nosy and overprotective; it's the older sister in her.

~~~

Harry never comes back.

Petunia has never expected him to, not since she took the warnings written in green ink that never faded and turned them into an excuse to be horrible to the last living reminder of Lily and the world that took her away. He, she thinks, rightfully considers himself liberated from a house that failed to ever be his home, from a family that gets to claim that connection in blood and government forms only. 

~~~

A few years later, Dudley catches sight of him in London: a tall man, gawkiness fading into a confident stride, hair still as impossible as his father's. They meet in the middle of the pavement in front of Charing Cross, both having made eye contact long enough for social obligations to have kicked in, awkward conversation piling out until they've reached the polite minimum.

"He's doing well, Mum," Dudley says over the phone. She can hear the crunch of the Bakewell she'd sent up with him when he left on Sunday come down the line; he must be eating over the sink again. "Says he's going after bad you-know-whats, making sure there are no more kids like him."

"Hmm," Petunia replies, and that's that.

~~~

They meet again, because of course they do: London is a huge, sprawling metropolis, but the passengers on the 7:00 AM Northern Line train from Barnet that get off at Charing Cross is a much smaller population. Dudley keeps her appraised of his appearance, commenting on his state of dress, his state of hair, the fact that he's usually sat next to a rather windswept, redheaded man who grumps lowly in a Devon accent.

Dudley doesn't tell Vernon any of this, and Petunia follows suit. Their discussion of Harry is limited to when Dudley rings on Sunday nights to assure her he's got home and Vernon's sat in front of the TV watching the cricket.

~~~

One morning, just before the dawn of the new millennium, Petunia's out in the garden, hacking away at the tangle of weeds that's decided to take the place of her summer vegetables. The air is crisp and cool, any heat cut by the lack of humidity and the ever lowering place of the sun, and it's quiet except for the low murmur of Radio Four leaking through the kitchen window.

A shadow passes overhead, briefly blocking out what little warmth is on offer this early. Petunia looks up to see the large moon-face of a barn owl staring down at her from its perch in the willow tree that overhangs the back half of the garden. It lets out the rattling wheeze she hasn't heard since the summer before Harry left for school the first time, and drops something on the ground at her feet.

It's an envelope, the kind used to deliver tax forms, about the size of a sheet of A4 paper, sealed with a sticker that looks like it came free in a letter pleading for donations to the NHS. It's fallen face-up, allowing her to see that, "PETUNIA EVANS DURSLEY. NO. 4 PRIVET DR. LITTLE WHINGING, SURREY," is written across the front in scratchy black ink.

She looks at the envelope, then at the owl. 

"I'm not picking that up until I'm done here. You can either wait, or be about your business," she says, and then goes back about hers. The owl tucks its head under its wing and seems to go to sleep, content to wait.

~~~

An hour or so later, Petunia's back in the house. The letter's in front of her, the window―originally propped open so she could hear the news―now left open for the owl, which has moved from its place in the willow to sit on the sill. It, as far as she can tell, is still pretending to sleep.

There's no return address; the owl, she assumes, knows where it's supposed to go. Once, before Lily had died, she would have been angry at this blatant display of magic in the way only the thwarted can be, desperate to know just how it all worked but equally desperate to never been seen wanting to ask. After...well, she'd let Vernon take the lead on that sort of thing, which had gone as well as it had needed to. 

Now, she almost can't be arsed to care. After that dreadful year spent half-forgetting her own address, scuttling from the door to the bins and back, twitching every time she caught sight of someone not quite comfortable in their clothes, Petunia's found it's best to be glad that magic, when it comes to things like the post and protection, works, and to leave it at that. 

Besides, anything more sinister won't make it past the hedge, and she's got Ms. Jones over on Magnolia Crescent to thank for it.

Flipping the envelope over, she opens it with a clean butter knife left on the table from breakfast. Inside are three sheets of paper: a short letter addressed to her, and two with nothing but the names "Lily and James Potter" and "Ginevra Weasley and Harry Potter" written in the same messy scrawl.

Turning them over causes her to gasp, a hand flying up to cover her mouth as the images flutter back to the table. There, in front of the house she remembers Lily had been so proud of, were her sister and her husband, leaning against the literal picket fence they'd laughed about owning, arms around each other as they smiled and waved up at Petunia. 

Underneath them was another photo, this one of her nephew, looking more like his father than ever, standing next to a tall, red-headed woman in some sort of sporting kit, the two of them almost mirroring Lily and James' posture as they laughed silently. Petunia spreads the pictures out, ensuring that she can see the whole of both, can take in these small snapshots of a life she'd abused the right to be involved in and the lives she'd done it for.

As she watches, her nephew kisses the cheek of—what was it, Ginevra?—and walks out of the frame of his picture only to reappear in the one of his parents sitting next to it. It's the only time she's ever seen the Potters together, even if Lily and James will never be the right age to be standing next to their adult son, and it's this, more than anything else, that makes Petunia cry silently in her kitchen, with no one but an owl and a few moving photographs to witness this latest expulsion of grief.

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this was "Aunt Petunia Apologist", which really tells you where my head's at this quarantine. (I wish I could blame this all on quarantine, but lmaooo it was definitely started way before that happened. What's a compact writing schedule? We don't know her.)
> 
> The initial concept of this fic was, in essence, "How could he want to save the world of his parents if he wanted to come back to this one?" and was probably prompted by someone saying Dumbledore sucks (he does) and that Harry's treatment at the Dursley's was all part of a grand master plan (it was not). 
> 
> Some UK notes: all facts are based on what can be wikipedia'd real fast (you try and understand the metro system of a city you don't live in), and any complaints are to be directed there.


End file.
